The Wrong Side of Love
by Victoria G
Summary: An angst fiction about children, parents, and love I guess. I still remain atrocious at summaries.


**Disclaimer:** I don't claim ownership of any of the characters in the Mai Hime series.

 **Wrong Side of Love**

By Victoria G.

With a smooth, intentionally silent slide of the screen… pads of her fingers guiding, she enters. The focus required means she cannot ignore the way her own tendons stiffen from the action, rise beneath skin like rope pulled taut. The quiet is necessary because of what lay twenty steps beyond the entryway. Her purse is placed on the bench noiselessly and she removes her shoes in the same manner. Slippers on and she's moving toward the center of the room. She is all soft toes and balls of feet and filled with the particular sort of dread that comes only from knowing exactly what will be found.

She pauses a moment before she kneels beside the woman who sleeps there. Her hand is outstretched already, tucking an errant strand of raven hair behind an ear. The way strokes of moonlight cut that beautiful face into indefinable shapes… it scores identically patterned flaws along the inside of her. Those nearly colorless swathes of weak light... somehow only _they_ manage to properly illuminate the shattered pieces beneath.

Thoughts begin with a wish... that their features more closely matched… that her own features were so delicate. Almond eyes and oval face and a body whose shape and elegance have been left untouched by time. This body that still moves as though carried by the wind, it evokes evanescent whispers of memory… her child self watching as she is now. She wished then too for these things to be hers, but the golden browns in her hair did not darken nor did the unusual hues in her irises and the breeze will not carry her. She has always had to carry herself, a practiced grace by now perfected to the point of appearing natural. Though it has never seemed that anyone could truly tell the difference, the weariness she feels in simulating her polish is a constant reminder.

It seems at time that she is always simulating… always birthing new echoes or catching them in her ear. Her posture itself is an echo because nearly one year ago she was perched above another… touching fallen locks of raven hair but thinking something entirely different. Identical pose, the kiss of a full moon… that is where the parallels cease. The resonation is enough to tease those afflictive memories from her. Admittedly enough has not been much since _it_ happened. _It_ has become a collection of hours that continue to weave themselves into and around her every action. With past visions worrying her frayed hold on herself, the mixture of shame, guilt, and need she cannot be rid of turns her mind strange again.

Her wish is swept over by a disturbing but brief vision... tendons shifting again as her hands lift the face that lies below away completely… press it over her own. She closes her eyes… closes them to hide from the senseless and impossible belief that a different face would be a different life.

That beautiful visage, that midnight hair… it can never be hers, whether passed down or otherwise. She is too much herself… and too much her father. Too much of this woman who sleeps here now is her father's as well. Heart, life, and pride… all of them belong to him and he needs none of it… is in love with none of it… has never been.

" _Mother."_

She whispers it to the night as she refocuses and the darkness takes the word. Fingers of evening sort and store it with the many she's given to them already.

Hours of a life continue to slip away in lonesome blackness, so many of them dissolving beneath the daughter's unseen, helpless gaze. The thought of that much time lost breaks the daughter's own sleep just as often as gnawing memories... divides it with vivid dreams and grasping nightmares. Years have vanished… her mother's youth has faded... and that is far too passive a description. Years and tears... the tautness of her mother's skin... the brightness in her mother's eyes... it was all given away. The very sweetest stretch of a life given as a gift… perhaps the most generous that can be given, the most selfless. And her father who receives but is unreceptive... who takes but does not truly give...he offers only enough to feed the lie that keeps her mother's heart alive.

None of them can be honest because the truth has a taste they all abhor. Her father wears her mother as a disguise… normalcy, propriety… a far more acceptable picture than the man who lives three houses down, who has his own beautiful, damaged wife to decorate his arm. Her father pretends they are an exceptional family.

Her mother clings to a vision of him that animates the lifeless love between them… a pretty puppet-like creature whose devotion is never in question. Her mother pretends that she never saw the truth lying in a tangled, sweating heap in her own bed.

The daughter… she lies in many ways as well. She pretends that it is his fault that she could not hold herself back when faced with the same temptation. She allows herself to believe this is all her father's wickedness… some unavoidable, unchangeable imperfection in their moral center passed down. It is only fair because didn't the daughter learned from him to cope with that innate impiety's robbery of her self-worth, by surrounding herself with those who see in her what she cannot?

Did she not absorb just how to wrap their adoration around herself... dress herself up with it? Flirtatiousness and charisma as they become a sort of defense against that quivering emptiness…gorgeous gifts, compliments, and attention from silly girls for whom she sometimes cares for but does not ever love… are merely paper armor. The girls can see nothing of what is beneath her serene expression. They see what they dream because she adeptly reflects it back at them, disguising the tumultuous currents churning beneath a face that shows only the serenity of a gentle lake.

Each girl believes, just as her mother does, just as some obstinate part of her does… that love given hard enough and long enough will win out. She understands how truly impossible it feels to love another with such intensity… to be eaten alive with it. She understands what it is to have some inner defense rise unbidden, shroud her mind against the truth of unrequited love, hold her safely and firmly in delusion. She understands what it is like to choose the lie… she understands why. This is the single thread, this shared hurt…that connects mother to daughter and daughter to those she leaves in her wake.

That single thread is not enough to save her from her own weakness or stop her. Because the emotional vacancies expand too quickly inside her and she cannot simply bury them as her mother does. It is consuming. For her it has always been so and she finds her empathy ineffectual against the onslaught. She finds herself willing to cause pain if it will stave off the unbearable crush of her unfilled desires... of her repressed self-loathing… of the truth beneath the stories her mind invents for her.

The daughter does not acknowledge these girls publically, does not bring them home, or speak their names even when they stay for months on end. She can never have it turn to realness nor could she break her mother's heart a second time with the same secret that shattered her parent's marriage. His secret is now hers as well and it is a burden to them all.

She still, in spite of it all, pines for her one that cannot be… not three house's down… but across town. Her love that she betrayed, that bravely fought her, undeservedly forgave her, inexplicably revived her, and somehow loved her in return but not the way she so desperately, maddeningly desires... even now. The delusions come to her rescue, whispering new histories in which her behavior is somehow excusable. There are so many fallacies and revisions in her memory by this point… that she cannot even trust them. Only the most vivid… only the face and voice of the one she loves when the truth was discovered remind her what truly transpired.

Such thoughts plague her while she sinks in the darkness of this room where her mother should not be sleeping. She wonders...if she _is_ her father… has become him, then is she killing her mother as well? Is she not partly responsible for this woman who loves and languishes in vain? Who yearns because she carved herself hollow for another? Prostrated herself for the sake of that most blessed of emotions and was given nothing in return? Is she then her mother, turned her father? A woman who could not be selfless for love, simply because she is a fundamentally selfish creature? Is she somehow both at the same time? She can think of nothing so pitiable as that. It is so much easier to say that it is her father's fault, his genes, then consider all the causal factors… all that has built upon itself.

It is easier to blame the man who hoarded all of that love, kept it in his pocket where he could feel the best of it, warm and reassuring. He basked in its effects even through the hurt it caused, while the cloth of his own resistance protected him from ever truly touching the strength of her mother's emotion. It is easier to say she did not have a choice, being raised by and with such a role model.

Distance is such a relative measure, but he has always known the right place to stand… never out of sight and never out of mind. He is always inarguably… deliberately present, but at arm's length… two rooms away or worlds apart… an empty kiss or none at all. There is no difference, because the space between love and _in love_ never really changes. The daughter understands that now from both sides.

The inevitability of it all, her faith in that inevitability lets her live with what she's done. He must believe in it as well to act as he does. It is the only way she can conceive of that he could let himself go on as if none of this existed… as if her mother does not sleep on the floor each night while his limbs stretch freely across a bed made for two. It is the fault of this defect in them…this deep vein of selfishness… this corrupted version of love they carry within. It is why her mother lives this way, alone in their supposed bond... why she lives this way, spreading her loneliness to others to hide from it.

Bluish electronic light interrupts her musings, if these thoughts can even be called that. It a simple text, in the matter-of-fact tone she expects. Have that many seconds already slunk away into the night? Enough that the one she should not love has made her way across town evidently.

She can picture the woman's pretty mouth forming each syllable she reads on the diminutive screen… the expressionlessness on her face while the haughtiness in her eyes betrays her.

" _I would've dropped you off at the front door."_

She understands what it means, that there is a question inside. It is out of character for her to insist on being dropped at the end of her long driveway... to not allow her love entry into whatever part of her world the girl would step.

" _If you wanted to come home with me, all you need do is ask."_

She sends the words, knowing it will end the conversation… knowing it with such certainty that she places the device face down beside her bent calves.

This is the only 'no' she would ever give to the girl who has probably flopped her beautiful form, a form that she should not remember the feel of, forcefully onto her bed. It is the reason she brought her wounded love to another's home a year ago, rather than her own.

As heavy eyelids close, shifting slivers of unwanted memory and unbidden fantasy melding, she hears the creeping slide of the back door, soft feet on the hard floor… moving just as she had upon entering. She imagines for a brief moment that it is whom she was thinking of. She imagines briefly a tabula rasa between them… a bit of cloth falling away, the skin she's seen without permission revealed again… but this time given freely.

That face and the frightened retreat... they charge back on her almost immediately, destroying the momentary pleasure. Eyes open slowly against her will and her head is turning on its own. The intruder… their gazes meet as if a choice did not exist; emotion only in his. Her hand is reaching to rest on her mother's shoulder protectively as the last flickers of fathomless green eyes evaporate off the surface of her mind.

Shame and defiance paint his face only for a beat, because her father wants to pretend again… it is what they do. He wants to believe that she doesn't know what he's done and where he's been. He wants to believe it for the sake of his own dignity, as he nearly believes that her mother's walking on him was some passing nightmare. The daughter's unwavering neutral stare though, it exposes him. Their truth is spoken in silence, illusion of closeness broken, their connection fragmented yet still somehow painfully apparent as they face one another half a room away. Her father straightens and hardens but the softness invades his face and eyes.

He cares for her, is bothered by the notion that it may no longer be reciprocated… and she keeps her lips straight and her eyes empty deliberately. Her father looks away, looks down and then continues as if nothing has happened… bent neck the only evidence.

She wants to hate him, at times she does, but he is only a man... a lonely, sad man who cannot be his own salvation. There are too many reasons to hate herself and at times she does, but she is only a girl... a lonely, sad girl who wanted something that was not hers and stole it. Amidst all their flaws, all the pain they cause, all their similar selfishness and lack of deserving… he still has both the one that adores him and the one he adores, while she does not. An inexplicable feeling of betrayal and the suffocating weight of her mistakes… they war with one another. The soft creak of the loose floorboard outside her parent's bedroom rattles like thunder in her ears.

The daughter's only real and lasting solace is revenge…quiet and very nearly subconscious. She cultivates her own dissociation from him. She knows she has his love already and when she has love, she knows exactly what to do. She stays close but with measured space between them… the perfect amount, biting tension that snaps and sinks as deeply into his eyes as it has her own and her mother's and all of those young women and the man three houses down, who she once believed was an uncle. She takes her father's praise, his affection, but returns it in only the most superficial way. Her gaze is all facade… blank when she smiles at him and softened in an instant when she sees her mother. She knows his secrets, his soft spots, and reaches into them with slow motion jabs that aptly feign tenderness. Just as he has taught her to show others what they wish to see, she shows him exactly what he does not. His mirror, she teaches him what she would have herself believe she knows only because she is his. She shows him what it feels like to be on the wrong side of love.

end.


End file.
